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21 Responses

I would go after backlinks with the anchor text of "car rentals" back to www.rentals.co.uk/car-rentals. It will increase your domain authority and page authority without the risk of splitting your links across domains.

Historically, exact match domains appear to have proved great for rankings (high correlation, though not necessarily causation). It seems to be the general expectation, which I agree with, that recently and moving forwards, exact match domains won't have such a high weighting by the search engine algorithms, Google in particular.

If you can get hold of an exact match domain, then great, though not necessary if the website does it's job well and has all the usuals, such as great content and high quality relevant inbound links.

An example to build confidence; Google 'car rental insurance' you'll see that the 1st result is www.insurance4carhire.com which doesn't have the term 'rental' in the domain name.

Backlinks; naturally looking is usually the best policy. Certainly some to the homepage, some deep links too, usually to the main product pages. Depends on which pages you feel to be the most important to your visitors.

301'ing backlinks and subdomains; not advisable and usually some of that valuable link juice is lost. Best to have all or as many as possible pointing to the ultimate destination page.

Many thanks for both responses. My thoughts about 301'ing subdomains were the same until I recently came across a site listing their subdomain (301 to homepage) in backlinks which completed the search phrase by joining both subdomain and domain together. They rank #1 for the search term in Google. However, I have also seen them using the same anchor text linking to their homepage so this could be a legacy strategy.

Also, from my experiences with direct match domains... in google it barely helps. However yahoo and bing still place a lot of value in it. I would focus on building relevant links and on page optimizations for your site rather than trying to get keyword matches in your domain.

Sorry i may have worded that oddly in my reply. They would certainly count as a direct match if they are in subdomains. What i was trying to stress is that Google doesn't value direct match domains as much as they use too. However, Bing and Yahoo still do.

So my suggestion was to direct your focus to other important aspects of SEO. Go with a keyword match in your URL off your base domain, focus on those back links with great anchor text, and spend plenty of time on your on-page aspects.

Thanks guys. Just one other thing to throw into the equation, if the domain was unused and only contained half the phrase but a sub domain would be an exact match would it be worth using the subdomain?

The reason I am so interested in exact match is that I have an exact domain which outranks sites which should ordinarily be above mine.

i certianly have, i am woking on a job right now, where we have done just what you are contemplating, and they are ranking 2 on bing and 5 on google for chosen keyword phrase, that is only partial match to subdomain. it definatly has an affect.

If you want to rank for car rentals, i would have a seperate page for it, i would not 301 back to homepage there would be on no use of having a different url in teh first place. it would be in fact leak a bit of link juice as 301's leak link juice.

If you havge a lot of content for car rentals i would go for the sub domain. I have always prefered sub domains to sub directories but 2 recent development have pushed me further that way. 1. google WMT now count links from sub directories to a root directories as internal links and assume ownership of sub domains simply if you own the root domain, unless the sub domain has been verified but somone else.

2. Site links for a root domain include pages from sub domains.

In my expirences link juice flows freely from root to sub domains and back if you have stronng internal linking structure from sub domains to root domains and back..

I am not sure how sub + domain ranks in comparison to purly having the keywords in thedomain name itself, but it certainly would help.

I noted that my grammar and spelling was not that good in my explaining above, somay recap. If you 301 the subdomain, then it will not appear in searh enginesat all, it will show the final url, and there would be no benefit.

As for splitting authority, I don’t think that is true. Looking a site links fordomainname.com shows links for sub.domainname.com, I thing this shows thatsearch engines can tell it is the same site.

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